RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders
10 months ago by themachinestops to c/technology
I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
I built a decent PC a couple years ago, and I don't need to upgrade often since I don't really care about cutting edge. So I kinda dodged a bullet, but, this sucks.
Honestly the incentive to “upgrade” a gaming PC the past decade is really weak. Aside from a few AAA titles almost all games run just fine on old hardware. Particularly if you ditch Windows.
So let’s just all refuse to buy this overpriced shit. The same price increases have already happened to GPUs and gamers felt like they “needed” to pay those prices still, nah fuck that, don’t give these greedy pigs a dime.
Honestly, a system with 64GB of memory is pretty well-provisioned compared to a typical prebuilt computer system from a major vendor.
I've felt that historically, PC vendors have always scrimped too far on RAM. In late 2025 with our RAM shortage, it'd be understandable, but in many prior years, it just looked like a false economy to me. Especially on systems with rotational drives --- the OS is going to use any excess RAM for caching, and that's usually a major performance gain if one has rotational drives sitting around.
EDIT: And battery. At least in 2025, a lot of people are using SSD storage, and caching that in RAM isn't as huge a win as it is with rotational drives. But lithium batteries have gotten steadily cheaper over the years. The fact that smartphone, tablet, and laptop vendors aren't jamming a ton of battery in their devices in 2025 is kinda crazy to me.
I hear you, you makes sense, but that way lies the death of personal general computing, which would be a crying shame. You'll have nothing and (won't) like it a few years later, SaaS taking over powered by all those 'AI' datacentres. Peak phone could even have happened if RAM becomes prohibitive, instead they're just windows on an all centralized, subscription web services. I see it as a pretty existential threat for my preferred way of life.
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
not necessarily with hardware though. now they are flush with investments and have holes burning in their pockets. everyone is trying to get in on the first stage of AI datacenters.
they may artificially extend the bubble, but rapid hardware expansion/refreshing will be the first thing to slow down or stop when they see it’s not providing value.
assuming they will come down, if they can even get people to buy at an inflated price they wont reduce it.
The prices will never go down again. There is literally no reason for the companies to decrease the prices. There will be like a 50$ decrease and people would go "oh look it's so cheap now!!1!!" and companies will keep making 3 times their profits.
Thats how bubbles pop. Those safeguards dont prevent an infinite money glitch, they stop the entire system from crumbling in a mild headwind. People always think this time is different during the growth phase of the bubble.
nah, it's a casino. crash will come eventually, the complication is that both bulls and bears want the same thing in the end....higher those lines go up the more $ the people who know how much the underlying is actually worth can cash out.
a crash/correction is just someone cashing out and either not putting the $ back in or atleast actually putting thought behind how they put it back in. the real suckers are the ones buying into everything automatically no matter the price.
One thing I've run into is not performance with old hardware but missing features from the CPU/GPU. Think of tpm 2.0 requirements for Windows 11. There's other obscure instruction sets that newer games and programs require such as resizeable bar if you want to run a local llm.
Yeah. I'm on a relatively old build with DDR4, but still a decent processor and GPU. So far gaming have not been an issue with whatever I'm throwing at it. Not much in the way of loading times, and no real problem with the size of it. Some less game-y stuff, like video transcoding and 3D renders, also fine. And while I can see those improving somewhat with DDR5, I'm not sure it's the actual bottleneck. And gaming won't be much better with it… I mean seriously, moving loading times from 3 seconds to 2? I don't really care.
The real issue will be when things starts to break down, as hardware do over time. It's not that I want to replace the hardware if there's no pressure from the software side, but I will have to if RAM goes bad, or motherboard decide to not power up.
Instructions unclear. Purchased a 5090, 9800X3D and 64gb DDR5 RAM for playing Terraria. Also, it has shiny lights.
My PC currently experiences a memory overload if I play ~150mods Skyrim for more than 2 hours straight. I currently have 16gb DDR4, Gtx1660 Nvidia. My thoughts are that the graphics card is the weak link but those are still too big a ticket.
Sadly it may actually be your ram. I had a 1660 until a couple months ago and the card kept up fine, at least for older games. With 16gb of memory though my system kept bottlenecking. Upgrading to 32 was like a breath of fresh air
That's exactly what I'm thinking, newest game I play is 10 years old so I'm not expecting my cards to be out any time soon. I'm just miffed that I said I'd get more ram in December and then AI decided to eat all of it in November.
If it's a leak in a mod and some pages just aren't being accessed at all, then I'd think that the OS might be able to just page them out.
It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don't need all that much space to just store swap, and it's vastly cheaper than DRAM.
If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.
If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:
And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:
I have no idea the degree to which "lots of cheap, fast swap" helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it'll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.
If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it'll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don't expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn't need to last forever.
Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.
Playing it on a lean linux distro (or simply neutering Windows heavily) helps a ton. There's tons of Windows stuff that just sits in the background for no reason.
There are also texture optimizers for Skyrim, and some other performance mods.
Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they've already done the technical work).
I think there are already community tools for texture management and decompression.
And… I don’t know. There’s such a critical mass of mods now that it doesn’t seem worth breaking compatibility with them all once again?
The Skyrim mod scene is actually extremely messy; if you look at other bigs ones (like, say, Stardew Valley), there’s a lot more cohesiveness and performance consciousness among modders. Or Mass Effect, which is more consolidated amongst a few big modsz
So I think the Skyrim community could do a better job of creating an easier to set up, more performant out-of-the-box experience for players, even as jank as the game is. But the game just has a different culture around it, I think.
Funny enough, I'm actually running bazzite. That's why i know there's a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol
Well, just to rule it out, have you tried Windows? Like a neutered windows with defender disabled and such.
I’ve found that Linux can get rather fussy under high memory pressure. It works and doesn’t crash, but it also really bogs down anything high performance once the swapping begins.
It can also get fussy with Nvidia.
So I’m not saying Skyrim will run better on Windows, but it might be worth a shot.
I run CachyOS, yet I still keep Windows around for some other heavily modded games.
I want:
- Multitasking speed
- Fast SSD storage for dev tasks, builds...etc
- Large SSD storage for games
- Memory to run multiple development environments, lots of research tabs, and not have to turn them off to go play a game for a couple hours
- A GPU capable of playing most games on decent settings on a 4k monitor (upscaling allowed)
So generally this means:
- mid-high end CPU
- mid GPU
- 64+ GB RAM
- 1x High Performance 1TB m.2 SSD as primary drive
- 1x w/e 2TB m.2 SSD for secondary
RAM prices makes this.... Absurd. My current PC is actually getting a bit slow for me now, it's about 5 years old now, and it's time for an upgrade. Which is going to cost me 2-3x what it should, simply from RAM....
I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated NVMe swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn't actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.
My guess is that this generally isn't the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what's eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I'd expect it to be pretty effective.
dev tasks, builds…etc
I don't know how applicable it is to your use case, but there's ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.
It looks like Mozilla's sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven't used it myself.
Or use zram/zswap on Linux with ZSTD compression, which dedicates part of physical RAM to compressed swap.
My predicament, personally, is that my computer is starting to feel slow to me but I'm on AM4 and ddr4. The good jumps in performance are to be had in moving to the newer generations, which means that buying ram cannot be avoided. The suboptimal move is to stay on this legacy platform and be satisfied with marginal gains while investing further into hardware that will become obsolete sooner
I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's vaguely like Second Life, popular with folks creating adult-content-oriented-worlds.
From a technical standpoint, that might actually be a pretty good example of a game that would benefit from cloud gaming, since I assume that it's not all that latency-critical, not the way an FPS would be.
I guess that there would potentially be privacy issues with adult content stuff that would argue against cloud hosting, but in the case of VRChat, the service itself is already living in the cloud, so...shrugs
64GB of DDR3 RAM in a system of that era is straight nuts!
Ah, completely forgot that Intel 6th gen introduced DDR4 - I would’ve sworn it was much more recent than that!
You’ve certainly gotten your money’s worth out of your system - that’s for sure!
I went from a 3570K, 16GB, GTX 670 -> GTX 1080 (later SLI’d), to my current rig:
5950X, 32GB, RTX 3090 -> RX 7900 XTX
Just before the Ethereum mining rush took off, and with the current pricing due to AI fuckery - I don’t think I’ll be switching up anytime soon.
Not even. More like 3 months ago.
The pair of 2x16 DDR5 6000 TEAMGROUP I bought back in April was $90 from Amazon. According to pcpartpicker, pricing started trending upwards late September, which Newegg still had it at $89 (9/30/25; B&H @ $109). The same pair at B&H is currently $439 (12/21/25) and MemoryC is asking $596. It's insane.
Ya but video cards have been insane since covid too
Even before covid, when crypto was the big thing
One of the commenters said:
"avoid building a PC right now" is advice I've been following since 2017
And honestly yeah. I guess at this point if you can afford it, just pull the plug whenever, it's always some bullshit going on the PC Market anyway.
I built my PC in 2019 right at the end of the year and I thank the gods everyday. I've only done one CPU upgrade since and it's still great for 1440p gaming. The whole tower minus monitor and what not was probably like $900 at the time
Same timing for me also. Still plays new games relatively well. Especially considering I have an ultra wide monitor
I am running a 2020 ryzen 5950x CPU and a 2080TI I got from a closing down sale of a computer store for $700 in 2019, just before the first Crypto rush.
I dont see myself buying any hardware for performance reasons for the next 3 years. Also not buying new AAA games anymore.
Small studio and indie titles on 50% off steam sales has been my jam of late.
Small studio and indie titles on 50% off steam sales has been my jam of late
Oh, same.
The wacky performance I've been getting on Talos Principle 2 has been annoying me though. Wish they stayed on the Serious Sam engine instead of switching to UE5
Don't consume any AI products. Don't consume any products made or marketed with AI products. Don't support any companies than invest in AI or are invested in because of AI. Lets kill this nonsense in 2026 and bring computing, jobs and wealth back into the hands of ordinary people. And a prememptive - NO BAILOUT for the tech bros when this shit crashes.
AI is mainly being aimed at B2B
Why? They are so old! Besides I always liked NSYNC better.
As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.
I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they've been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn't even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.
12th-gen CPUs are safe.
Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.
I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).
EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.
EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD's AM5-socket processors, they can't use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.
Get Into books.
Lots of indie and medium size studio games thst run great on hardware from 5 and 10 years ago. AAA gaming is a AAA scam at thr moment. The really quality is in developer owned games.
or play some (a)vn’s.
What... what does that mean?
if you can't switch to linux, upgrade windows to LTSC. massgrave.dev is your friend, they have installers and an activator, maybe it can even change the windows type without reinstall.
and then start planning your transition to linux. don't overthink it, just what you need, and what files you need over there, especially before deleting windows. fedora kde edition is a good starter distro, you shouldn't need to tinker it if you don't want
I assume this:
https://www.securityweek.com/...
The tech giant previously announced that users can pay for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates to get patches for another year, but this week it revealed additional enrollment options, including free alternatives for individual users.
Specifically, consumers can pay roughly $30 per PC (depending on location) to enroll in the ESU program and receive security updates for one year after Windows 10 reaches EOS.
If they don’t want to spend money, they can simply start using Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud. It’s worth noting that Microsoft recommends Windows Backup for backing up files and settings before switching to Windows 11.
Another ESU option that does not involve spending actual money is to enroll for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which users earn for engaging with Microsoft products and services, such as Bing, Xbox and Microsoft Store.
“ESU coverage for personal devices runs from Oct. 15, 2025, through Oct. 13, 2026,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explained.
So you can get one extra year, but you need to tie the PC's Administrator account to a Microsoft account, and either need to pay a $30 subscription fee, spend their Microsoft Rewards points, or set the PC to sync to their cloud service.
IMO, the pricing is an extortion scam rather than a real shortage. People are falling for it because of AI hype narrative. Best to wait it out.
It's by choice. Samsung did announce recently that they are going back to consumer ram production instead of trying to compete for low margin big contracts on current gen hbm. At half of current prices, ddr5 is more profitable than HBM even for hynix (leader).
My old i7 4790k with DDR3 can run for a little longer.....
Yeah, it sucks though. It feels like building a PC has been inadvisable more often than not. Thanks to the GPU prices being ridiculous a while back. Now this. It's crazy that you have to time building a PC between these stupid waves.
Did some server maintenance yesterday, including driver updates. Broke my system since it updated my Nvidia driver to 590.x which no longer supports our little 1060s. Had to roll back the driver, thankfully easy. Suppose I better start keeping an eye out for some sort of upgrade...
Amd 9070xt and 9060xt options are probably the best you are going to get for the next 2 years.
Dont buy Nvidia again. They just end of lifed the 10th most popular GPU used with Steam.
Nah, it's not doing a lot of heavy lifting on my server, it'll be good for years to come most likely
DDR4 RAM is presently cheaper than DDR5, but it has also increased dramatically in price recently.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
DDR4:
DDR5:
So happy I bought a m.2 for my laptop right before this insanity. Wonder if spinning plates are coming back to the menu?
Dont wait too long, retailers are catching on and increasing prices.
As soon as I saw the prices of ram shoot up a couple weeks ago I started looking into am4 chips and so did everyone else I guess lol. Now I don’t even see the 5800/5700x3d for sale at all in my local used market.
Lol what?? 5800X3D was like $250 when I bought mine. I wouldn't say it was cheap but its defintely not a "money is no issue" kind of number.
Edit: alright rereading your comment, you were probably talking about people who want to buy a 5800X3D right now with today's price, and not just anyone who was ever in the market for 5800X3D-level CPUs
Way too late
No. Ddr4 ram prices have been tripling this year.
I needed ddr4 ecc, but couldnt justify paying 3x the price that I paid last year.
Also wanted to buy ddr4 sodimm for my wife's laptop, you guessed it, 3x the price.
“Do you guys not have phones?“
Not a hardware fix, but there's memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:
https://www.xda-developers.com/...
Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I've mentioned here recently. I don't know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems with SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable to zram.
As far as I know, Fedora turns it on, but only for a percentage of the memory since the performance hit is only slightly better than using swap.
Ah, thanks. Looks like they enabled zram in Fedora 33:
Too late already, pricing on those went up within a week or two. Best you can hope for is second hand market from sellers who dont know what they have.
So do we expect the cost of gpu's to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier
Top GPUs used to be like 600CAD. Then the covid thing happened and they've never come back down.
True! Luckily I'll always aim below the top of the line.
As a silver lining, you think this could stabilize GPU prices? Or at least CPU prices?
If there's less RAM/SSDs to build PCs with, then people will buy fewer GPUs/CPUs for them.
GPU prices
Outside of maybe integrated GPUs, I doubt it, because they need their own memory and are constrained by the same bottleneck --- DRAM.
Or at least CPU prices?
I've read one article arguing that CPU prices will likely drop during the RAM shortage.
I don't know if that's actually true --- I think that depends very much on the ability of CPU manufacturers to economically scale down their production to match demand, and I don't know to what degree that is possible. If they need to commit to a given amount of production in advance, then yeah, probably.
Go back a couple years, and DRAM manufacturers --- who are currently making a ton of money due to the massive surge in demand from AI --- were losing a ton of money, because they couldn't inexpensively rapidly scale production up and down to match demand. I don't know what the economics are like for CPUs.
November 5, 2018
To be clear, the oversupply concerns that have plagued Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares for weeks now are completely valid. Micron stock has fallen as much as 40% just since June on this deteriorating dynamic.
In short, the world doesn’t need as many memory chips as Micron and rivals like Samsung (OTCMKTS:SSNLF) and SK Hynix are collectively making. The glut is forcing the price of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) modules so low that it’s increasingly tougher to make a buck in the business.
We had a glut of DRAM as late as early this year:
https://evertiq.com/news/56996
Weak Demand and Inventory Backlogs
Both the DRAM and the NAND markets are still in a state of oversupply, with excess inventory leading to significant price declines through Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. This is driven by multiple factors such as weak consumer demand.
Memory manufacturers ramped up production during previous periods of strong demand, but the market failed to meet these forecasts. This has resulted in inventory backlogs that now weigh on prices.
Nvidia is already diverting "midrange" gaming GPU production to AI.
CPUs and motherboards might become cheaper, but I doubt it. Companies are much more willing to sit on inventory these days.
Yeah :(
Still though, Intel has their own fabs not really restricted by any of this. And not as easy to spin down as PCB making. So the CPU is likely to be the cheapest of anything.
I just built a PC with 64GB Ram Corsair Vengeance 2 months ago. Paid 250€, quite expensive IMO (was used to more like 50€ ten years ago). But who pays 1000€???
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it? Anyone do this?
My old HTPC is running a Z87 motherboard with a 4770k i5 cpu with 16gb of ddr3 ram. It is chugging along. I had plans to build out something new in the same case but I don’t want to feed into this bullshit by buying now. The more people show their willingness to pay these prices the happier manufacturers and retailers will be to charge them. But I think it might get worse, too, and maybe not better. Ugh.
Whatever I build might be the last one I do considering how long I kept this one.
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it?
I'm sure that you could do that, but I think part of the problem there is that everyone else is going to be in the same boat, short of RAM, and I'm not sure what demand there is for a gaming PC stripped of its RAM.
If there isn't much demand, you might have trouble recouping what you spent on the parts you don't want.
I read one article that CPU prices may drop, because the increased RAM prices will drive up PC prices, price some people out of the market, and so there will be less demand for CPUs.
That’s an interesting theory on the CPUs. Though it walways takes longer for prices to drop than it does to rise. I’ll be keeping an eye out.
You’re right that selling the parts may not actually be profitable or even recoup expenses. Though I was thinking I had a gpu that’s decent enough for my 1080p gaming so could sell whatever 5000 series comes with it for cheap and give someone a nice deal.
I just bought a used HP office computer basically for the 32 GB of DDR5 (only 5200 but I'll take it) on eBay. Just gonna throw a 9060xt in it for now. Combined its a sub 700 build. I'll probably swap it to a new mobo and case next year as the power supply is a little underspeccd and I believe the HP pinout is nonstandard. Maybe I'll just jam a flex PSU in there and pin the cables to match.
I imagine there would be regulations preventing one single individual billionaire from pre-purchasing 40% of the global supply of RAM.
Market is isane that what comlnisme do to a country /s
I don't like that this was removed, but it is very ironic for a AI summary about AI hype fueling a RAM shortage. It was at least properaly labeled and attributes and an open source model.
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
The best we can do is just wait when price will fall down after ai bubble will explode
save